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Why I don't hand out Unedited Images

Now, normally this isn't something I get requests for very often, however its seems as of late everyone wants the unedited images.

  It is actually considered to be extremely unprofessional for a professional photographer to hand out unedited images. And is a common practice to NOT distribute them among almost all professional studios and photographers. I understand how confusing it can be when you hear the shutters clicking so many times so let me explain the reasoning behind this. There are many reason why photographers, myself include, do not even entertain the idea of handing them out.

1) Those unedited images are photos of you with your eyes closed, mouth opened in mid-speech or I where I am testing light. I'm not going to give you images that you look awkward in. Seeing photos of myself where I don't look so great doesn't do me any good. So I'm going to give you images where you look your best. I go through the images with a professional eye to select the images that both speak of me as professional photographer, e.g lighting, proximity, composition. and that also show you in the most flattering way. You hired me for my artistic vision and I give a complete product. The rest of the images are deleted. I take several images of the same shot to 'get everyone right', most of the time I can have 20 images of a wedding party and get maybe one where everyone looks normal, with happy smiles, eyes all open, not brushing hair out of their faces. And with the off change I get a few more.... what is one going to do with  3 images of the same pose?

2) I, as most professional photographers, shoot in raw format, which means the files need to be converted to photo files in order for you to so much as view them, much less print them or upload them to Facebook. My programs are set to open and work on these files but to open them up in just windows or with standard apple soft wear isn't going to happen. So to hand you over RAW files  wouldn't do anything for you and converted them is very time consuming.

3) These photos are a representation of who I am as a professional photographer. And with all studios and photographers there are two parts to creating an image; one is the part you see where I am taking the images with my camera and the other is post shoot work or editing. Every photographer has a different way of editing and this is part of their style. These photographs are both my art work and my livelihood. Unedited images are not the full idea of my work. A restaurant wouldn't serve you raw chicken, an author wouldn't give you over the rough copy of book. Construction workers wouldn't give you just the frame of a house nor would an artist give you a sketch of the piece you hired them to paint. Same idea here.

4) I delete the unedited images. After selecting the best images for you I delete the images that won't be used. Why do I need 30 hard drives of images that won't be used taking up space and slowing down my computer.

5) "I want to edit the images myself." Well, unless you have consent from the photographer.... that's kind of illegal as the photographer owns the copyright, as per the copyright laws of Ontario since 2012. You can't turn them black and white, crop them, add text or remove watermarks without the photographers say so. Your edited versions of a photographers image is a misrepresentation of the photographers work. It's not just the photographers art work you are editing, it is their livelihood too.




 

As you can see I have brighten this image, colour corrected, also added some colour.

 
I thank you for understand and respect my polices. They are in place for a reason. I don't pick favorites and give them out to certain people, all my clients are treated the same.

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